Louisa Meets Bear (32 page)

Unfazed by blizzards or transit disruptions, César had never missed a week, the only exception when his grandmother died. Now Ilana could not remember exactly when that was, perhaps seven, eight years ago, only that he'd called her to say he had to go back to Colombia for three weeks.

“If you need to hire someone else, I understand.”

“Of course not. Don't worry at all about that.”

It had sounded as though César was crying. Ilana had been uncertain if he was crying because of his grandmother or because she'd said she would not give away his job.

*   *   *

Thursday afternoon, Ilana stopped at a locksmith to copy her keys for César.

The locksmith pointed at the larger key. “Where's the card for this one?”

Ilana stared at the locksmith. A card, a card … When she and Bill had bought their apartment, Bill had insisted on changing all of the locks to the expensive sort that require a computerized card to copy the keys. He'd made a fuss about finding a location to store the card. With her office, she could no longer remember who had given her the keys, much less whether there had ever been a card.

“Is there any other option?”

“Change the lock.”

“How much would that cost?”

“Two-fifty for labor. Plus the cost of the cylinder.”

It was a lot of money, but she had no confidence that she'd ever find the card and didn't want to make more complicated arrangements with César, arrangements that would mean more contact with him. “When could you do it?”

The man looked in a smudged notebook. He put on his glasses and turned the page. “I could do it tomorrow nine to eleven, three to five…”

Ilana studied her pocket calendar. Her schedule was so tight between her patient hours and picking up the girls two afternoons a week, any deviation plunged her into what felt like a crisis. She knew it was an absurd arrangement, since nearly every week brought disruptions: the girls' illnesses with the need for doctor's visits and then pharmacy trips, leaks, broken appliances, events at her daughters' school or business dinners she was expected to attend with Bill. Had she been her own patient, she would have said that there was something sadistic about her expectation that life adhere to the schedule she'd made.

“I can't. I see patients Friday morning, and I need to pick up my kids at school at three.”

“Well, lady, it's your door. I can only come when I can come.”

“There's no other possibility?”

The man turned the page of his notebook. “Saturday, nine to eleven. Time and a half.”

*   *   *

At her mother's grave site, there'd been a discussion with the rabbi as to whether they should proceed without her father. The gravediggers had a strong union, it was said. Their lunch hour, a full sixty minutes, began at twelve. If the grave-site service did not start soon, they would have to wait until the gravediggers returned from lunch.

It was February. The earth was frozen and the air was damp. The women, their legs covered with only nylon stockings, were shivering. Her mother's eldest sister told the rabbi to proceed.

The casket, bound with green straps, was lowered by a machine into the already dug grave. The dirt that had been removed before they arrived was covered by a tarp, as though it would make the huge mound next to the hole seem less grotesque.

When the coffin reached the bottom of the pit, the gravediggers took off the straps. Ilana wiggled her hands free of her aunts' hold so as to edge nearer to the grave. The casket, viewed from above, appeared monstrously large, way too big for her tiny cancer-consumed mother. It was inconceivable that they were going to leave her mother in this freezing pit.

The rabbi threw the first shovelful of dirt. It made a thud as it landed, spattering across the top of the coffin. In her head, Ilana screamed. Outside, in the frigid air, it was silent.

*   *   *

On Saturdays, Ilana usually took Sarah to softball while Bill read the paper and Janey watched cartoons, a habit Janey should have outgrown but had not. Now Bill would have to take both girls with him and stand on the edge of the ratty field making small talk with the other parents. Had he been a character on Janey's show, there would have been a sizzling hiss as she touched his arm.

“I have to meet a repairman at my office,” she said. “I'll meet you at the game. You can leave as soon as I get there.” Ilana hated her apologetic tone, the implication that she should feel badly that Bill would be spending more time than usual with their children.

Not until the cab was halfway across the park did Ilana wonder if César would be at her office. She'd always left it up to him when he came on Saturdays. She closed her eyes. “Please, no,” she said to herself. She wanted to sink into her chair and drink her take-out coffee and read from the volume of Chekhov stories she was carrying in her bag, stories she found more illuminating than most of her professional journals or the conventions she'd long ago stopped attending. She wanted to leave behind her thoughts about her patients and Bill and her children, let her mind rest on the desolate landscapes and exquisite manners of another time. Afterward, she'd be happy to see her family again. By then, Bill's foul mood would have dissolved into three cups of sweetened black coffee and the weekend pleasure of wearing jeans and sneakers and anticipating his afternoon run. The girls, buoyed by the Krispy Kreme donuts he would have bought them and the fresh air, would be giggly, touching her shoulders and hands and hips like they were toddlers again.

Yesterday afternoon, as she'd left, she'd given her own keys to the door staff for César. When the Saturday doorman told her the cleaning person had taken them upstairs, her hopes for the morning evaporated.

The outer door to the suite was unlocked. Ilana could hear the vacuum cleaner. She carried her coffee into the waiting room. César was working bare-chested. A spray of black hair fanned out from his navel, surrounding his surprisingly pink nipples.

“Jesus. Dr. Ilana. I am so sorry.” César reached for his sweatshirt, pulling it over his head, then leaning down to shut off the vacuum.

Standing up, César was beet red. “I take off the sweatshirt because I get so hot. I didn't know you were coming. I am so embarrassed.”

“I came to meet the locksmith. I need to change one of the cylinders.”

César sat down in one of the waiting room chairs. He doubled over his knees. “Jesus Christ. Look at all the trouble I cause you. You have to come in on Saturday. All because I did such a stupid thing.”

Ilana perched on the chair across from César.

“You've done an excellent job all these years. Everyone makes a mistake on occasion.”

The truth was, he'd done a good-enough but not excellent job—not, she thought, because he was lazy but because he didn't have the sensibility to think on his own to do the things Nona did automatically: wiping out the inside of the refrigerator, dusting the tops of the picture frames, polishing the spots from the bathroom faucets. The notes Ilana left suggesting extra attention to certain tasks never seemed to have an impact beyond the week they were received.

With César in the suite, she couldn't read. She puttered around in her office until the locksmith arrived. It took him ten minutes to change the cylinder. She wrote him a check for four hundred and sixty-three dollars and threw out her coffee.

César was in the patient bath, scrubbing the outside of the toilet with a rag she didn't recognize having provided.

“It's all fixed. I left the new set of keys for you on my desk.”

César stood up. Beads of sweat dotted his hairline.

“Do we need anything? More cleaning products, vacuum cleaner bags?”

“I buy. Don't worry.”

All of these years, she'd kept track of the supplies and bought them as needed. It would be easier if she let César do it. One less item on her to-do list. “But you shouldn't be paying for the supplies. Let me get some money to give you.”

Ilana went back to her office for an envelope. She put fifty dollars inside and wrote César's name on the outside with a green felt-tip pen. She gave him the envelope. “Pay yourself back for whatever you buy. You can put the receipts inside. Just leave me a note when you need more cash.”

César waved his hand. “No, no. You give me a check already each month.”

“That's for you. For the work you do. This is for the supplies.”

César looked at the floor. A puddle of Mr. Clean had dripped onto the tiles from the rag in his hand. “I just want to make you happy.”

*   *   *

Before her August break, a trip this year with Bill and the girls to Italy, she left a message for César that she would be out of the office until Labor Day. Could he please water the plants and perhaps use the time to defrost the refrigerator?

In the morning, there was a message from César:
I do my very best with your plants and your refrigerator. I hope I please you. I wish you a good vacation with your family.

She'd planned their trip so they would begin with five days in Rome, then move on to a villa with a pool and some nearby picturesque villages. She'd been to Rome only once before, the year before she started graduate school, a year during which she worked as a personal assistant for an eccentric art dealer. Her employer had owned an apartment in Rome, and she'd accompanied him on a trip he'd made to procure some paintings. Driving in from the airport, she'd pressed her face to the window, her heart springing open as they passed the Colosseum and the acres of white Brescian marble of the Victor Emmanuel. “If only we could see these wonders freshly,” her employer said, with a wan movement of his hand. He rested his head on the back seat of the taxi. “Not painted and filmed and written about so many times that all that's left is the art about the art.” She'd wanted to argue with him, but the very act of arguing would have tarnished the moment.

On this second trip, Bill was the scrim through which she and the girls experienced the city. He'd been to Rome twice before, with an old girlfriend, not Louisa, but another Princeton girl whose parents owned a villa outside the city. From what Ilana could gather, those visits had involved a driver taking him and the girlfriend and her parents into the city for the afternoon during which he'd wandered around uncertain of what he was seeing and slayed by the heat while the girlfriend and her mother went shopping and her father went off to meetings that everyone knew were euphemisms for visits to his mistress. Afterward, there had been expensive dinners at restaurants where the girlfriend's father would be greeted by name and Bill would wish he'd worn proper shoes instead of his sneakers.

Now, here with the girls and her, it again seemed that it was the Roman heat that made the strongest impression on Bill, so that Ilana found herself thinking more about organizing their days to include the rare air-conditioned interior than what they would see. Then too there was the limit of his patience. He was interested in the maps at the Vatican Museums and the Roman baths Michelangelo had turned into a church, but was done with the busts in the Museo Nazionale in a quarter hour and baldly refused to climb the stairs to see the Caravaggios at the Borghese.

By their fourth morning in Rome, Ilana woke dreading another day navigating between the places that she wanted to show the girls and Bill's irritability. “Sleep in,” she whispered in his ear. “We'll be back after lunch.”

“Dress quietly,” she told her daughters when she woke them. “We're going to let Daddy rest.”

Janey's brow furrowed. With any hint of marital discord, she could dissolve into tears.

“He's just tired, sweet pea.” Ilana kissed Janey on the forehead. “We'll have fun.”

Breakfast in the hotel dining room without their father transformed the girls into Eloises at the Plaza. Sarah ordered ginger ale with her “bread and jam,
grazie, signore
,” which Janey echoed with a “Me too,” escaping Sarah's usual refrain of
copycat, copycat
, Ilana imagined, only because Sarah was afraid a quarrel would cause her to veto soda.

Outside, in the fragile morning air, Ilana linked arms with her daughters, the three of them able to walk abreast. They crossed the Tiber, pausing on the tiny island that seemed like part of the bridge to watch a dog running in circles on the bow of a fishing boat. With the girls still laughing about the dog, they made their way to the church of Santa Cecilia, where Ilana remembered her employer having shown her the sculpture of Cecilia lying on her side, the position, he'd explained, in which her miraculously preserved body was viewed by the sculptor on its disinterment a thousand years past her martyrdom.

When they exited the church, it was into the blaze of the midday sun. They took a taxi back across the river, to the Via del Corso, half of the stores the same ones they could find on Madison Avenue but more exotic for Sarah and Janey here. Too hot for lunch and with the girls still infected with the excitement of their purchases and all of them with the sense that Bill's absence made the day a busman's holiday, they went to a gelateria, where the girls ordered ice-cream sundaes and Ilana had an iced coffee in a tall frosted glass.

“One more stop,” Ilana perkily announced as her daughters spooned the last drops from their silver bowls. “It's a church with a crypt full of bones.”

“I don't want to see any more churches,” Janey said. “I want to go back and watch TV.”

“Mom just bought you a pair of jeans and a skirt,” Sarah instructed in the Austenish tone she'd recently adopted toward her sister, a tone that infuriated Janey. “And you can't even spare two minutes to do something
she
would like?”

Sarah smiled sweetly at her mother. She was already as tall as Ilana and could wear Ilana's shoes. She hadn't done too badly herself on the shopping expedition, with a pair of Italian Pumas and a studded denim jacket.